Lincoln's Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President's Mission to Destroy the Press - Softcover

Manber, Jeffrey; Dahlstrom, Neil

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9781402207556: Lincoln's Wrath: Fierce Mobs, Brilliant Scoundrels and a President's Mission to Destroy the Press

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1402207557 ISBN 13: 9781402207556

Publisher: Sourcebooks, 2006

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In the blistering summer of 1861, President Lincoln began pressuring and ordering the physical shutdown of any Northern newspaper that voiced opposition to the war. These attacks were sometimes carried out by soldiers, sometimes by angry mobs under cover of darkness. Either way, the effect was a complete dismantling of the free press.

In the midst stood publisher John Hodgson, an angry bigot so hated that a local newspaper gleefully reported his defeat in a bar fight. He was also firmly against Lincoln and the war--an opinion he expressed loudly through his newspaper.

When his press was destroyed, first by a mob, then by U.S. Marshals "upon authority of the President of the United States," Hodgson decided to take on the entire United States. Thus began a trial in which one small-town publisher risked imprisonment or worse, and the future of free speech hung in the balance.

Based on 10 years of original research, Lincoln's Wrath brings to life one of the most gripping, dramatic and unknown stories of U.S. history.

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About the Author:

Neil Dahlstrom is a noted historian and scholar and has written on many topics of nineteenth-century America, including the Civil War. He lives in Moline, Illinois.

Jeffrey Manber has published more than 50 articles in publications such as the New York Times and has been interviewed on CNN and other networks. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

From Booklist:

In All the Laws but One (1998), the late William Rehnquist examined the legal propriety of Lincoln's suspension of various constitutional liberties. This book tells the story of one such instance, the suppression of a Copperhead newspaper whose proprietor fought back in court. He was Pennsylvanian John Hodgson, whose Jeffersonian expounded on states' rights, white supremacy, and abominations of the Lincoln administration. Discoursing on the eastern Pennsylvania political players incensed by the Jeffersonian's secessionist sympathies, the authors introduce the local congressional representative who engineered the confiscation law under which Hodgson was muzzled. After vandals destroyed his press in 1861 and marshals barred him from the premises, Hodgson had his day in court, where federal officials testified they had acted on Lincoln's order. Vindicated by the jury, Hodgson impresses the authors--setting his views aside--with his irascible indomitability, and their animated recovery of this forgotten character will mesh with the great interest in Civil War journalism. Gilbert Taylor
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